Best Actorly Homecoming (2012)

Kathy Fitzgerald in Gypsy

She used to be "ours," but then actress Kathy Fitzgerald left the Valley for New York and the Great White Way, and became — thanks to a long string of major successes including Wicked, 9 to 5, and the original company of a little thing called The Producers — "Broadway's Kathy Fitzgerald." Still, we were briefly able, earlier this year, to reclaim her when she came home to star in Phoenix Theatre's production of Gypsy. She played Mama Rose and, from the moment she made her entrance from the back of the house, carrying a Chihuahua and rasping a holler at her kids, took that old theater archetype — a woman whose made-up life was further rewritten in stories told by her daughter, Gypsy Rose Lee — and made her entirely real. Even if she weren't our hometown gal made good and a real-life Broadway star, it would have been impossible not to be knocked over by Kathy Fitzgerald's magnificent Mama Rose.